Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 provoked a fundamental restructuring of the Ukrainian state in ways that are internally contradictory and increasingly self-undermining. That is the central argument of this important article by Volodymyr Artiukh and Taras Fedirko, published in Focaal in 2025, which draws on two intersecting lines of fieldwork: Artiukh's long-term ethnographic research among Ukrainian forced migrants in Romania, and Fedirko's study of civic elites (…)

The killing of Melkiana Duwitau — a 31-year-old woman, 32 weeks pregnant — in Intan Jaya, Central Papua, on 2 July 2026 is the latest documented case in an escalating pattern of civilian deaths from Indonesian military operations in the Papuan highlands. Komnas HAM's Papua chapter has described violence in Intan Jaya as escalating “in both scale and intensity, with a growing tendency of targeting civilians.” Over 105,000 civilians across Papua had already been internally displaced by (…)

"Comment désigner la période que nous traversons ? Le nombre de ces termes traduit peut-être une forme de désarroi face à quelque chose dont on perçoit mal la trajectoire et chacun d'entre eux a sans doute sa part de vérité, mais souvent met l'accent sur un aspect particulier. Il apparaît préférable de se centrer sur la substance et la dynamique des processus actuels au-delà de leurs traits particuliers. L'expression utilisée par le juriste et philosophe américain Bernard E. Harcourt pour (…)

Israel's Elbit Systems supplies the spywear Serbia uses to enforce loyalty among its public sector workers and disrupt the massive youth protest movement. Adam Novak analyses President Vučić's multi-vector strategy: the extractivist relationships with the EU, China, and the UAE, arms deals with Israel, Russian oil, and the convergent social movements beginning to name the connections.
Neoliberal non-allignment?
Serbia is presented, by its own government and by sympathetic analysts (…)

In 2025, interest payments on Ukraine's public debt exceeded total spending on pensions and social programmes. Debt servicing consumed 42% of all domestic budget revenues. Ukraine's own tax receipts — projected in 2026 at UAH 2.9 trillion (USD 67 billion) — are sufficient to cover defence spending, and nothing else. Every pension paid, every hospital kept open, every school running is funded by a foreign loan. This is the situation four years into a war of national defence against Russian (…)